pleased to see so many people attending. my program today will basically be on training and expertise, being able to go out, understand the gravanis culture and then take it to court and get a successful prosecution. just a little background, i'm not going to read it all. i pretty much go by sergeant because i was only a lieutenant the last 3 months and i found out if you google me under lieutenant you find something. i stick with sergeant because i have about 14 years on google for that. i spent about 28 years as a police officer for the city of san bernardino, california, about 80 miles outside los angeles. among other things i'm recognized as an expert on graffiti in california superior court. without reading all this i want to let you know that i am well rounded, i was

supervisor of the unit to be supervisor of a multi agency dealing with it to being executive director for the entire state, california graffiti association of california. so i have a fair amount of background. i first became involved in graffiti back in 1991 when i was told in the gang unit that i was going to be a two-week assignment to deal with these guys called taggers. i continued until i retired so it was a long two weeks. a lot of times cities don't understand how deep the issue goes. i have had my card handed out, this is my phone number. i have absolutely no problem with people calling me any time to discuss graffiti issues, graffiti cases, any of that

stuff, i am always available. that's why i put my card out there. so first off, before we get into the graffiti part we have to talk about the person whos going to be dealing with graffiti when he goes to court. personnel and training are the two keys to success in any detail, we're going to talk specifically about graffiti but in any assignment as a police officer. when we hire on a police officer we look for 3 things besides integrity, we look for the ability to do the job, the desire to do the job and the interest. if you are missing any of those 3 things eventually the officer will not be successful. when i was in personnel we were only hiring about 1 out of every 100 people who applied to the city. so you can see it's a very stringent requirement when you

are looking for people to do what you want to have done. this is particularly important when you are initially deciding who wants to be a police officer, we want to get them through the academy, get them through probation and make them successful officers. but it's just as important when becoming a member of a specialty unit. the iplt is really big. there are probably people in this room saying i got graffiti when somebody else wanted it, and that's hard. and there's people like me and the officers i have hired into my units that just love the job and see the value in it, see the value for the community. so you've got to have that interest or else, again, you are going to have not as successful an officer. now you found the officer, you got him figured out, i talk a lot about officers but the same applies to civilians, anybody sitting out in this audience. because my concept is anybody can be a graffiti expert and a

lot of that comes down to training. where do you find this training? first it's police officers, we get a lot of it through approved training classes, things certified by the state, post-classes and that's fairly consistent in a lot of states that have a group that authorizes what kind of training the officer gets. articles and books, that's fairly self-explanatory. and really you wind up in the next group, which is the internet. there's so much stuff on the internet, if you are curious about anything having to do with graffiti, start googling graffiti stuff. if you get on you tube, put down tag crews fighting, that's not just battling with paint, that's physically fighting with altercations. the thing about the internet, sometimes people will ignore some of the major graffiti sites because we're out here to fight graffiti, why do we want to go to a graffiti site. a

lot of these guys when they have dedicated graffiti sites like art (inaudible) you can read all kinds of articles written by taggers for taggers trying to train other people to be better vandals. so don't ignore the fact there's stuff out there for the graffiti vandal because that can be of huge use to you. meetings, we hold a monthly task force meeting and our task force meeting pretty much covers everything from santa barbara down to san diego is our main group we have a task force meeting with. we share ideas, it's evolved over the years, become more formal. now each time we have a meeting we try to do some new training or talk about the technology available, i will talk about the technology in my class this

afternoon. it's really good because we document it because when you go to court, you can show training on a monthly basis. conferences, i can't tell you how excited i am these are happening. only in the last two or three years have these major conferences come about. the one up in canada, they were a great group of conferences and other people started to pick up on this. when i became an officer dealing with gravanis in 1991, there were no conferences and there was virtually no interest. as dr. spicer mentioned, every time it got good, i foupld myself out of a job. i was out of a job for about 6 months because it fell apart and then came back together. mer and more cities are realizing gravanis is a pattern crime and as dr. spicer pointed out, it's a great way

crime to many other activities. so you can wind up precluding with a lot of other stuff by dealing with them when they are down to the part doing gravanis damage before they escalate to a more violent crime or serious crime. it's nice to attend different trainings. this one here is great because we have people from all over the country, canada and the united kingdom. there are things you are going to listen to when you go, yeah, i would never do that or couldn't do that because of the laws in my political jurisdiction or whatever, we are not allowed to do that. then there's going to be other things when you think, gosh, i never thought about that, i think that would work really good. i'm going to take it back it my jurisdiction. probably over the past few years i've got 500 people i've dealt with, officers that have come to the class and subsequently become gravanis experts and set up programs.

almost every program is different. a lot of the basis is the same, the information is consistent worldwide but people will tweak what information they are going to use and how they are going to be allowed to operate. some are in plain cars, some in marked units, it all depends how it's going to go. take the information you get, there's so much good information here today and tomorrow, take the information you want, take it back and integrate it into however you are going to work your program. when we come right down to it, it's not important what you know, it's what you can prove in court. probably every officer sitting in this room can say i have an investigation or we did an investigation where we did the investigation, i know the guy was dirty, i know he did the crime, you send it to the da and the da says you do not have enough to prove it in court. in my career i had numerous people i believed did homicides that we could not

take to court because we did not have enough provable evidence. i think that a lot of lay people underestimate the abilities of law enforcement professionals and maybe it's because i've been a cop 28 years but i think cops are the most adaptable trainable guys i've ever been around, the quality of people in the police ranks is upb deniablely good. it's good that a lot of people underestimate it because a lot of criminals underestimate us and quite often you will finish a long-term investigation where the crime happened 6 months ago and when you are interviewing the guy and he says, i never thought you'd catch me, and they don't. they don't think you will catch them but officers spend the time to do it and again that comes from their training and working with it. as a law enforcement officer you are required to come up with expertise in all kinds of disciplines. you come to work as a patrol officer and you walk out on the street, first call you get might be to go to

a traffic accident. you have to look at the physics, you have it look at the scene and see what happened. you might leave there and go to narcotics activity, leave there and go to child abuse, a shooting, a stabbing, those are all different crimes. when you think about it, that's a staggering amount of information the officer has to know and he's going to get grilled in court to make sure he knew that information. experts are all made, none of them are born. say an officer goes to traffic, he has a real interest in traffic and he's going to do traffic reconstruction and everything up to fatal accidents. for him to be able to do that, he's got to go out to a scene, he has to look at evidence, he has to be basically a map maker to create

a diagram about what occurred, he has to look at the weight of the vehicle, the radial skids, apply the laws of physics and come up with a reasonable explanation about what occurred in that accident. same thing, a narcotics officer goes in, he comes in cold. he's going to have to learn things like chemistry because he may walk into an active methamphetamine lab because he's going to make a decision how that lab will be shut down and his decision can affect the lives of everyone walking into that scene. that's quite a bit of a jump to go from a civilian to basically figuring out how you will protect people in a scene like that. so we get to gravanis, there's nothing to gravanis compared to those things. the biggest issue with gravanis over the years, when i started in the early 90's is there was very little information out there and it was difficult to come up with consistent information. and i have dedicated a huge amount of my career to creating

consistent information that we can take into court. this is kind of a good example because i have an hour to speak up here. anybody who has heard me speak knows an hour is not a whole lot of time for me. but when you good to court, you are going to be in the same situation. when i go to testify in court to take these guys to trial, your time is going to be very limited. in that time, you're going to have to go in there and present simple, understandable concepts as to what is the foundation of your case and you have to go in there and do that to educate the jury and to educate the judge. a lot of these people and the judge have never been in front and had to deal with a gravanis type case. the information should be consistent. you have defense attorneys that start going through 2 or 3 our 4 cases and they hear the same thing and they hear somebody professing to be an expert and this guy does not know, it puts a big

hole in his expertise right off so we wanted to have something consistent. now, if you properly present this information, it will easily establish the officer as a credible expert and at that point you can start rendering expert decisions. trainings that you go to should be set up in such a way that every jurisdiction has an expert. sometimes you have to piggyback on somebody else's expertise while you learn, but there's no reason that every jurisdiction can't have an expert in gravanis and that's going to come in handy when he's talking to city hall people about allocation of resources, to his department about allocation of resources, when he decides how he's going to set up his program, when he decides how he's going to set up his investigations and how he's going to take them to court. there are experts in here, i know, and i know they know if you have that kind of knowledge and you can confront these guys, a lot of guys will

confess because they are just so blown away by the amount of knowledge you have. again, they underestimate us. so with the limited time i have, i'm going to present part of the foundation of my expertise that i present in my 8 hour class. if i only have limited time i like to put this out because this allows civilians, it allows officers to understand there are differences in the gravanis culture and you have to understand these differences and be able to articulate them in court if you are going to get prosecution. and by having these trainings that are consistent, it also helps clear up misinformation that's widely reported in the media which can really hurt you in court. for example, this article came out november 2012, there's a homicide in a church in the los angeles area. big, big story because two church members contacted a subject who was,

quote, tagging doing gravanis on the church. a subject emerged from a near b*if vehicle, shot and killed one church goer and wounded the other one. big, bold letters it read things like various newspapers read the same thing, taggers shoot two church goers. tagging suspect shoots church goers. but when you go into the article and read the whole account of the incident, it's reported these are gang members and these are gangsters putting up gang gravanis. but when people read this stuff in the paper, that's where they are getting their input. they have never had any training and it starts to blur the line. what's a tagger, are they all gangsters, do gangsters tag, and sometimes the jury is going to have that in your head when they listen to your case so you need to clear that up so they

know exactly where you are coming from when you are doing a case. so over the years we developed 5 types of gravanis. now there are a lot of ways to categorize gravanis. you might be looking historically and looking at old school new school stuff, geographically, east coast versus west coast stuff, but this is easy to articulate in court and we can explain exactly what we've got and what we haven't got. we're going to talk about each one of these individually. you've got communicative, you've got hate, you got gang, tagger, art's in there and then i used to just kind of glass off this one called anomaly. i don't consider it one of the five major forms of gravanis for prosecution but it's important that it's there because it allows you to

classify all gravanis in one way or another. >> i think it ae's public and private property. i'm against graffiti. >> who can get it out the most who can be noticed the most. >> i i've seen seniors doing graffiti. >> the city is art, other people who have their names tag -- >> [inaudible] our unit there are 2 sections we are doing one is abating and others are notice

of violation to private property. all the utility boxes in public right-of-way we abate. >> we abate calls that come within 48 hours. >> we are a small group in g f graffiti. we don't have enough help. >> i have a group in town down and china town and the north tunnel. [inaudible] the graffiti we abate everything is coming up to the areas now. >> i'm willing to take it on. i think -- >> you are telling me you are ready for this? >> i think so. >> okay. >> there you go. >> all right. >> all right. >> ready to do it. let's go.

>> want to get the gray signses this over here and the garbage can and normally we don't do private property since it's on the corridor route you can come with me we will use black. >> we had a lot of changes in the graffiti unit. we do private property if someone moved we remove it and send it to the attorney's office and they take appropriate action. >> damage their property there. it's important to write the color in case they want to say what part of our house you abated the graffiti on. >> using your safety glasses the gloves. >> you got it. >> you know some places we

gashi, people appreciate that. you know, a lot of timeses they say, thank you. >> the time where it's visible. a lot of people put it on the ground. >> i like when tourists come and say, you do this for your city and you get paid for that? >> we use the [inaudible] for the holes and the retaining walls. [inaudible]. white on the fire hydrants. fire box red for the fire boxes. our brown for the pg and e

poles. >> we are not painters we do our best. >> i'm assuming it has to do with gang activity. >> if it's territorial i mind. >> in case it's gang related and they are marking our territory i would like to paint it over. >> anything with numbers like x iv or x 13 west side mob and the bay view those are gang related. with gang related or profanity we will abait it as soon as possible. >> i consider it an art. there are circles of people that form around it whether or not

they should ruin public property. >> this is art work i'm for it. unless it's on someone's property and they don't want it there. judge kids with silver paint expressing their ego needs doesn't belong on our property. >> graffiti is when you don't have permission to write anything on their property. >> eighth street is part of your regular rout? >> yes. >> everyday. >> eighth street. divisidero street. irving street. every block they going through they paint 3 or 4 streets in the block the poles the utility boxes, mailbox. >> thank you. >> okay. >> put the drop cloth.

come on around. >> there you go. force for we have to remember we are not painters we abate graffiti. we are abaters not painters. get that out of the way and keep moving. >> how many of these do you do a day? how many poles we do a day? >> yeah. >> depends on the location. may be 20. >> do you like working with the team? >> yes because i'm a people person. i like being outside and interacting with the public and i like the response we get especially from the good job we

do in the community. >> goodbye. . >> hi, my name is sharon, i'm the graffiti project manager for the city of edmonton, canada. for some of you weren't in my presentation earlier today i'll go through what the city of edmonton is doing in terms of programming but then go through auditing and what we do. capital city clean up brings cities together to create safe, clean inviting xhueplts and neighborhoods. our motto is a clean and safe edmonton is a shared responsibility and we work on the premise that we

can't do it alone, that we need to work as partners with the community to create solutions to graffiti vandalism and litter enforcement. just a technical point, if any of you want to ask questions, they are recording the session so they would like you to speak into the microphone and if you have any questions along the way, please feel free to ask. when did capital city clean up start? it was launched in 2005 as a pilot program focused on litter reduction in the downtown of edmonton. basically businesses were asked to adopt a block in their area and were responsible for litter clean up in that area and the program had such a huge success that they expanded the program in 2006 to include a residential component for litter pick-up. we now have over a thousand adopt a block captains that are responsible for adopting blocks around the city of edmonton for picking up

litter and they each have crews of 4 to 5 thousand people so so we have four to five thousand people picking up litter. we link nonprofit organizations with businesses and the businesses pay the nonprofit organizations $650 per summer to have the nonprofits pick up litter in the blocks surrounding their business. the advantage to that is, again, community responsibility. they're not just picking up litter at the businesses, they are picking up litter in the surrounding blocks. we have a school litter reduction program that was started that year as well so we focus on educating schools on litter pick-up in the city. in 2008 the program was expanded to include graffiti and 2008 was when our by law

was amended requiringing property owners it remove graffiti from their property or face a $250 crime. the one success from our program was the council at that time looked at the idea that we can't hold citizens responsible if we're not responsible ourselves, so they created our management program at that time. that includes bylaw enforcement as well as civic clean up and support for property owners. the program expanded again in 2009 to include a cigarette litter reduction program. we have a huge problem in our city with cigarette litter. we found that through our litter audits that we have done, we have a higher rate of cigarette litter in our cities compared to other cities in canada. expanded again in 2010 to include needle disposal and i said in the other session, this is what i am escaping from in

edmonton right now. yay, san francisco. so we have a snow angel program where we ask citizens to voluntarily shovel the snow off their neighbor's lawns. so these are all the programs offered by the capital city clean up program. we started in 2005 as part of the waste management branch and this past year in 2012 we were moved to the community standards branch which is where we are housed now. so we have a very strong link with our programs between the programs that we offer and the community standards or community bylaw ordinances that we're operating under. the lation that we focus in on is 14614, that is the bylaw that governs litter pick up in the city. community standards 146400 is the graffiti standards bylaw. our bylaw is unique to other cities in that

we don't focus on the definition of graffiti, we focus on whether or not graffiti is considered a nuisance on a property. so the bylaw is written such that it has to fall within the definition of community standards, the nuisance property and therefore we're not ever restricted by a definition and people arguing whether what's on there fits within a specific definition of graffiti, it all falls within whether what is on the building constitutes a nuisance. it also gives strength to it because we don't run into the possibility if somebody says that, well, i want it there because i gave permission to it, permission is not a factor, it's whether or not it's a nuisance property. in canada some jurisdictions have their bylaws such that they can charge taggers with fines for doing graffiti tagging. we